Nursing His Business Along

Like so many in our market, Jerry Faulring headed off to college with absolutely no intention of becoming an innovative leader in two different segments of the green industry.

Faulring grew up in western New York in a snowbelt area south of Buffalo historically dominated by dairy farming. He loved the agricultural environment, but he wasn’t too crazy about becoming a traditional farmer. 

So, he headed off to Purdue University to become a veterinarian, but ended up in Purdue’s famed turf program, led then by the legendary Dr. Bill Daniel. When most of the 13 turf graduates headed off to careers in golf or chemical sales, Faulring went to work in sod production at a Maryland farm. A few years later, a friend enticed Faulring to start a lawn service business. It was 1973 and ChemLawn was just emerging. When they came to town in 1976, Faulring piggybacked on their aggressive marketing and business model (“We were a little more customized and tried to do things differently, but we pretty much picked up ChemLawn’s crumbs,” he says). The result within a few years was Hydrolawn. The company exploded from 300 customers in 1975 to 4,200 within three years. Over the next decade, they grew to 17 locations in five states.

He was so successful that, 20 years ago, he was profiled as a young lion of the industry in the pages of Lawn & Landscape. The interview portrays a man at the top of his game who was pioneering and leading the then burgeoning lawn care industry. Yet, in 1990, Faulring had largely divorced himself from the business and turned his attention to the nursery market. Lawn & Landscape decided that it was high time to catch up with him and find out about that decision, his life, his work and his philosophy two decades later.

What led you to leave a highly successful lawn care business for the world of growing nursery products?
The industry started to mature in the ‘80s and labor became a problem. Then regulatory issues started to hit us. My entrepreneurial spirit was a bit dampened. I wasn’t bored, just less interested. In 1989, I went to Oregon to hunt and fish with my friend Paul Bizon who was also in the nursery and lawn care business. I decided right then – even though I didn’t know how to do it – that I was going into the nursery business. We planted our first crop the following spring on 25 acres. I still had the lawn care business, but did not work at it full-time. Basically, Hydrolawn’s success allowed me to be the farmer I’d always wanted to be. I spent the next five years searching for the perfect piece of land to expand on. In late ‘95, I found it. From 2000 to 2007, we averaged 28 percent annual growth.

What have you done to separate Waverly Farms from the pack?
We knew we didn’t want to be like everyone else, but our niche happened by accident. In the nursery business, you want to offer a variety of things all at once. You have to time the plantings to have a diverse menu for customers during the buying season. And, it’s difficult to get all the varieties to become available at the same time. Early on, the shrubs matured too early. We found a lot of customers wanted that larger look. That drove me to grow larger than usually available shrubs like hollies, viburnum and other very large, very handsome plants. Now we do it by design.

Our business today is about 90 percent shrubs and the remainder is ornamental flowering trees. We grow very few shade trees. Freight costs are now a big issue so we’re starting to grow more material that would be typically sourced out of Oregon. The slower it grows the more we want to grow it. We pick things that are always in demand but never outgrow their space. We shoot for an average rotation of six or seven years with some plants requiring 10 to 12 years.

Speaking of business cycles, how have things changed for your business in the last year?
Business cycles happen, but I can say with certainty that this was the most precipitous and sudden decline in sales I’ve ever experienced. Our growth was OK in the spring, but we knew something was up. It all kind of happened over the course of six weeks. I honestly thought the phones were out of order the week after Labor Day.

The industry is in a tailspin right now. A lot of customers are just frozen. The next year is gonna suck. I hear people say it’s going to be a “challenging” or “interesting” time. No it’s not… it’s just going to suck.

We cut $750,000 in expenses, but the main thing is you try to make good choices, suck it up and weather the storm. This cycle will end – although it may be more prolonged and deeper than others I’ve seen. It’s a fact that there will be fewer competitors. Unfortunately, people will go bankrupt. It’s painful for a while, but it’s a cleansing. I hope this is the last one for me.

What did you learn from those previous downturns?
Don’t trust in government. It’s not a solution to all of our problems. Government is largely made up of people with big egos and greed disguised as leadership. They’re not necessarily bad folks… just regular people with normal human failings.

Also, be very independent, know your own space and manage without relying on help from others. The critical thing in small business is to have very deep pockets or to have a really good banking relationship. It’s hard to know which banks will be there when things get bad, but you have to nurture and develop those relationships and, above all, be honest and don’t hide things from them.

What’s the No. 1 lesson you’ve learned from an agronomic standpoint in the past three decades?
The most important thing relates to nutrition. Contrary to what I’d learned in school and what we practiced in the lawn care business, synthetic fertilizer is not the only choice and can often be the wrong choice. Soil is the most valuable input that we can manage, and making the soil work for you is the hardest thing we do. I’m not a hippie, but you have to be cognizant of what happened before us. Synthetic fertilizers have only been around for 75 years or so, and good agriculture has been around for thousands of years. They relied on organic amendments to the soil. The soil web, microbial activity, whatever you want to call it… you can enhance it so much by increasing organic matter.

We use compost at about 100 tons per acre. We make our compost ourselves and our plan is to use zero synthetics in 2009. It took a long time to figure out the right recipe, but we finally got it right. We use deep tillage to mix the organics in. The result is we’ve increased growth and productivity up to 40 percent. When we realized that, it was a “light bulb” moment.

What advice do you give to young people thinking about getting into the nursery/landscape business?
First, you need to be passionate about it. If you’re not, it won’t be fun long-term.

Mandate time for family and leisure – you have to have recharge time.

Find a good mentor – someone you respect and admire not necessarily for how successful they are, but for how they interact with people. Find someone with good ethics who is widely respected.  

Finally, don’t get lost in the “sea of sameness.” Too many people look at others and mimic them and become a part of that sea. Find a niche and serve a part of the marketplace that’s not well-served. Make sure you run the idea by other people who’ll be honest with you – it’s too easy to fall in love with an idea and not be realistic.

There’s always this romantic notion that being your own boss is really cool, and you can get rich. You have to divorce yourself from that. Do a 12-month cash flow forecast and, when you’re done, cut the income in half and double the expenses. If you can’t make that work, reconsider it.

One other thing: Approach each customer with the attitude that they’re your parent or someone you really love. They’ll appreciate that and be there forever for you. If you’re just in it for you, it’ll come back to haunt you.

Twenty years from now, how will our industry be different?
I don’t think it’ll look much different. Sure, we’ll have more regulations and new issues to deal with, but the business as a business will look pretty much the same. Small businesses are at their peak operating efficiency when an owner/operator has his feet on the ground and doesn’t mind getting dirty.

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of consolidation in this industry and it just hasn’t worked very well because those bigger firms just don’t have that on-the-ground impact. There’s something about that small business relationship when customers can interact with the owner that’s really special.

I learned a great lesson in the late ‘80s. We were doing well, but we still weren’t making as much money as I thought we should. This was about the time of the savings and loan crisis and I lost my commercial bank and had a hard time finding a new one. We went without a bank for a few years and had to scale back. The outcome was that we doubled our cash flow and profit. The clear lesson was that sometimes smaller is better.

What’s the biggest mistake you made through the years?
One of the biggest mistakes you can make – and I’m guilty of this too – is not preserving enough cash on hand. Some guys buy boats or vacation homes, while others, like me, tend to reinvest in the business too much. Manage your cash reserves.

Also, it’s easy to begin to think you’re invincible if you’ve had some success. Some owners can effectively manage many good managers and some can’t. Find a size and scope where your skill set works best.

Final thoughts?
It’s been a wonderful experience – you feel like you’ve been “chosen” to be a part of the green industry. We’ve been a part of the green revolution in this country long before it even had a name, and we should be proud of that. We haven’t been perfect, but we’ve adapted well. In the end, I’d like to believe some day, someone new will take this place over, look around and say, “He was a pretty damn good farmer.”